Trousseau.
Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality famously argued that in the “modern period the body has become a highly political object, a crucial site for the exercise and regulation of power”. While traditionally in western art the woman’s body was the object of lust and desire and the object which could be possessed by the active male gaze, in feminist inspired art, over the past half century, the woman’s body has frequently been conceived as a highly encoded receptacle for memory and experience, and one which is impervious to the male gaze. Within this tradition the body is viewed as a container for associations dealing with gender and sexuality, as a receptacle for female wisdom and knowledge, and this new concept, which has found expression in many different mediums and art forms, has been frequently presented through a highly personal and encrypted iconography.
In the Trousseau series of paintings, Jo D’Hagé engages with this broad feminist discourse dealing with the female body. She employs the female form as a reference to a symbolic container, one which bears a whole raft of literal, allegorical, symbolic and spiritual associations. In many of the paintings, the actual body is substituted by a dressmaker’s mannequin which is shown in the process of being clad in many deliberate disguises like a suit of armour. In some it is clad in bridal wear, ecclesiastic vestments, a veil, a corset or a mantle of attributes, garments which also frequently allude to the practice of the dressmaker’s craft. We are presented with a disguise, a façade or a veneer, but we are also provided with a privileged glimpse of a pathway for further exploration of other meanings, some of which lie beyond the depicted explicit imagery. There is a richness of allegorical associations relating to women’s work with cloth, to women’s roles in society, as well as to entrances, doorways and enclosures. Each painting is like a self-contained allegorical personification, pregnant with its own specific symbolic meaning, yet at the same time each painting also belongs to a broader family of other such personifications. A parallel may be drawn with Ripa’s famous Iconologia and other handbooks with allegorical personifications from the Baroque period.
As a title for the exhibition, Jo D’Hagé has chosen the collective term Trousseau, an old English word which entered the language in the Middle Ages from the French. In English trousseau has a double meaning: it is a reference to both a bride’s outfit of clothes and it also has a more generic meaning and can refer to a bundle or a grouping and can be applied to such diverse things as a bunch of keys. Jo D’Hagé has exploited this ambiguity in her paintings. In each painting there is this implied duality, the mannequin is clad in special garments, like the vestments of a bride, but there is also a bundling of concepts around each of these figures and this produces a rich fabric of vision with a multiplicity of possible meanings. Many of these interpretations are open-ended, meaning is not fixed or proscribed, and many various associations will be read into the work differently by different viewers.
In a way I interpret the series as a number of exquisitely painted, detailed but lyrical explorations of the structuring of the spaces of femininity within society. When I first saw these paintings in the artist’s studio, what I found disconcerting was the fact that the immaculately worked surfaces with their strong fidelity to actual objects, simultaneously appeared literal in their representations, yet they were also abstracted in their possible range of interpretations. The bodies are distinctly feminine, as are the regalia and attributes, yet, as the mannequins, they are shown headless, as dressmaker’s dummies, and hence objectified as if they are still life objects. Jean-François Lyotard once provocatively asked: “Can thought go on without a body?” These paintings of mannequins appear to me like vessels containing within them whole gatherings of thoughts and attributes, like structured objects within a museum display, but at the same time, at least in one sense, they are thoughts devoid of an actual body. They exist in that half-way world which lies between images of actual women’s bodies and images of abstracted symbolic entities which engage with ideas dealing with socially structured spaces of femininity.
This is a very strong, unusual and distinguished body of paintings. In their surfaces they have the quality of a shimmering sensual beauty, they are restrained in their colour range and elegant in their expression, but they also possess a cerebral rigour and toughness, as well as a quiet and distilled serenity. A field of vision and thought has been presented to the viewer, but the more you engage with each individual painting, the more you seem to become aware that the reality which you are witnessing also alludes to other realities, some symbolic, some allegoric, while others distinctly metaphysical.
Professor Sasha Grishin
Head, Art History – Australian National University
Trousseau.
If contemporary art is valued for the degree to which it fulfils the obligations of the avant-garde, then it is also important to value its role as a repository of knowledge and skills; as a process where the practices and traditions of the past are called up afresh; as a conduit that carries old orders into the contexts of the present.
In these paintings it is evident that the act of painting; the slow painstaking process of creating forms, of creating spaces that wait for the imagination to complete; has been one that has taken time. Surfaces such as these demand, in return, that the viewer also takes time: time to linger, to observe, to consider the qualities of surface, of suggestion, of artifice and illusion.
The artist Jo D’Hagé has titled the exhibition trousseau – a word associated with the past, with a commitment to an order that has, perhaps, passed. It is also a word that is associated with the passing on of treasures, from a mother to a daughter, at a point at which the daughter is to undergo a rite-of-passage. In an historical sense the trousseau is associated with a wedding, and is a preparatory casket filled with costumes and linen.
In the objects in these paintings, however, the costumes are stripped bare, and the antique dressmaker’s dummy seems to await more sinister apparel. The linen, on the other hand, remains fully visible as both the substance, ground and subject of the work, with all its heritage and association with privilege in the hierarchy of visual arts intact.
Since her student days D’Hagé is an artist who has been preoccupied with the search for a feminine sensibility. The influences of those artists who have informed her work – Kahlo, Rego and others – are evident not so much in the choice of subject matter, but in the suffocating stillness that seems to trap the subject matter. There is a sense in which everything matters – each object selected, every formal arrangement, each space and proximity seems loaded with the artist’s will to suggest a state of being beyond that which is depicted.
From the time of Greek mythologies to the present video blockbusters, male protagonists have dominated rites-of-passage narratives. Jason and Ulysses metamorphose into Luke Skywalker or Neo. And although there are female protagonists to match these icons of individuation, there is another parallel tradition where female rites-of-passage narratives are wilfully in-visible; where the heroines are eclipsed by a sense of shared experience; where heroes are supplanted by a sense of community.
These paintings, and the title of the exhibition, suggest a rite-of-passage that is sticky with feminine allusions. And, in keeping with the role of Art, they allude to the forms and icons of the past while refusing a retreat into sentimentality. Instead, they hover Janus-faced; committed to an artistic practice that is informed by history and an insistence on skill, artistry and surface, and also to a practice that calls up the need to re- envision invisible yearnings into the breathless present.
Pat Hoffie, May 2005